The Ultimate Adventure

A special audio adaptation of the Doctor Who stageplay from the 1980s. The Doctor and his companions confront the Daleks who have allied themselves with the Cybermen and a deadly band of mercenaries, in an epic adventure spanning time and space.

2 Comments

Tanlee
on May 7, 2016 at 8:12 PM

“You know Jason I can cope with most things in the cosmos from Daleks to Dinosaurs but that woman…. terrifies me!”

Everyone knows that there are very few dirtier words in Doctor Who fandom than ‘pantomime’. To many fans there is no worse crime the show can commit than to degenerate into pantomime, and the Sylvester McCoy era is most frequently accused of this unforgivable sin. There are also some humourless fans who levy this charge against the later Tom Baker/Douglas Adams comedy era as well, but I fail to see how such Adamsian wit is ever in the same league as anything so lowbrow as pantomime.

But actually turning Doctor Who into a pantomime during the Sylvester McCoy era wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to the show. By then the worst thing already had happened when Eric Saward had turned the show into a miserable display of violence, mean spiritedness and turned the once admirable Doctor into both a victim and a bully. Actually the term panto-nasty has recently been coined to describe the style of Season 21 and 22, which actually captures quite well the tasteless, stylistically schizophrenic and queasy feel of that ugly era. By contrast making it a full blown pantomime in the McCoy era was perhaps a necessitated clearing of the air and return to innocence. But still we’re somewhat sympathetic to the McCoy critics, and we can think of few good words for Season 24 because it’s near enough impossible for anyone not to feel patronised and insulted by its childish, asinine content, and whether or not you think the show improved quickly in the final two seasons, the fact is the show takes a step too far and finally feels like it has irrevocably lost its sense of authenticity in a way that had never happened before (yet this somewhat works in the McCoy era’s favour in terms of making it fair game for some bold retconning), it’s the same way that the TV Movie and the current New Series will never realy feel like ‘proper’ Doctor Who.

But in many ways we feel that the ever changing diversity of Doctor Who means that there are no real rules to what Doctor Who can and can’t do, so long as the execution is sound, and if the show can do pantomime well, or better yet do something subversive with the style then it should go for it. We feel that the problem with the much maligned Season 24 wasn’t necessarily with the pantomime elements, but rather the cynical, insubstantial and joyless way they were done. But by Season 25, the show was starting to get it right, and was producing pantomime stories like The Happiness Patrol which was a good example of pulling off the style in a more sharp, pacy and upbeat way, and Greatest Show in the Galaxy which was a superb spontaneous, quirky, creative masterpiece that carried a hard edged message delivered in an uncompromising, unconventional, non-conformist way. Mind you, fans could feasibly say the same of Eric Saward’s period and argue that the quirky, rare twisted genius of The Two Doctors and Revelation of the Daleks was proof that they were finally getting it right before Michael Grade’s interference set them back to square one.

But the question remains about what category The Ultimate Adventure fits into. Upon a first listen it clearly fits into the same ‘cynical, joyless’ category as Season 24, and even seems to rift heavily on the utterly hollow Delta and the Bannermen. Infact it’s probably the closest thing to a Season 24 story that Big Finish has ever done (although The Rapture is a sure contender for matching Season 24’s ‘Doctor Who gone incontinent’ feel). It’s laboured and patronising and really rather asinine. The tendency towards observational dialogue describing the action is especially condescending and reaches infuriating levels, as it’s worse than in any other Big Finish production and no-one seems like they’re even trying to smooth it out. It’s clearly a wafer thin plot that’s simply contrived to suit another JNT shopping list, and even threatens the destruction of the Tardis again. As this is a Dalek story, the Cybermen and mercenaries clearly only have one reason to be in the story, for spectacle’s sake and to conveniently turn on each other at the climax for a neat contrived happy ending. The fact that they haven’t even been considered is made particularly clear when they first abduct the Envoy, with the mercenaries going in first and taking heavy losses, only for the Cybermen to go in as the second wave and prove themselves impervious to the gunfire and able to win their prize, which begs the question of why the mercenaries were sent in at all, and simply makes their deaths seem pointless and stupid in a rather cruel way. It may seem silly to gripe about a plot that can’t possibly be taken seriously, but coming from the same pen that gave us Horror of Fang Rock and Brain of Morbius, two of the finest plotted stories in the classic Who canon, it’s a depressing comedown.

The romantic scenes between Jason and Crystal are so horribly saccharine, that they conjure unpleasant memories of the sexless days of Adric, Tegan and Nyssa, back when the show was being made strictly for arrested adolescents only. The same feels true of the death of Delilah in punishment for her promiscuity, which is the story’s most reactionary moment (and the most artificial, blatantly scripted ‘woman’s dying words to her lover’ scene I’ve come across since I saw The Matrix: Revolutions). It’s hard to see the story’s view of women as anything but textbook ‘virgin-whore’ complex. Going back to the complaints above, a convoluted and gratuitously elaborate take over the world plot can work if the central threat has a credible and threatening presence and if the obstacles against the hero are believable and involving, as with Mind of Evil. But this is a pantomime story with Daleks, and so after years of Big Finish building up the Dalek Emperor as the Notorious BIG Godfather of the Daleks, and making him so insidiously evil and reprehensible that you wouldn’t be surprised if he was organising a paedophile ring on the side, here the Emperor is diminished and reduced to a pantomime villain, and as a result there’s just no sense of there being a ticking mind in there anymore, and as for his Dalek minions, well they suffer a heavy pasting and trampling of their dignity that’s almost as irrevocable as Journey’s End’s conclusion which denigrated the Daleks collectively into a funny turn. So this is overall just indulgent, suspenseless hollowness. And just like with Journey’s End it’s done solely to pitch the story at a younger children’s audience by maintaining a squeaky clean hero at all costs, and so the spinning Daleks, just like the climactic infighting with Cybermen and mercenaries are a convenient means whereby the Doctor is let off of having to destroy the Daleks himself, like he normally would. The latter example though is somewhat more offensive because it essentially reduces the Doctor to an utter coward who runs away at the first opportunity and leaves the mercenaries to fight it out without lifting a finger to help them.

On repeated listens, however, you may find things to momentarily like about it, and the fact that Colin Baker and Claire Huckle as Crystal give it their all and clearly have gotten into the spirit of things, provides a certain charm that begins to get under the listener’s skin. The musical approach to children’s space adventure was clearly inspired at the time by Terrahawks (which, it must be said handled the juxtaposition with far more wit and irony) with Crystal taking the role of Kate Kestrel. Claire sings the most asinine lyrics with a real joy de vie, and the kind of beautifully piercing vocals that cut deep, regardless of how fluffy the content, and sounds like something that could have stood well alongside the competition of teen popstars like Kylie, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson and even the delightful Martika back in 1989. It’s a shame that the musical story never goes for the opportunity to contrast the mechanised death incarnate of the Daleks, with the emotional, joival, spontaneous vibrancy of the music. Come to think of it, Daleks in Manhattan missed a similar trick.

It’s never going to be in the Season 25 category. It doesn’t have the spontanaeity or strangeness that Season 25 does. It’s all relentlessly formulaeic and conservative, even if it didn’t make praising references to Thatcher and Churchill. It might have felt more strange and spontaneous if the pacing and energy had been tightened, to an almost unsustainable degree where bits of the story were overlapping in surreal fashion, i.e, if the Cybermen had attacked in the middle of Crystal’s number and she’d kept singing throughout the siege. It all feels held back by the all too prevalent ‘literal minded’ approach of the JNT era that held such a stranglehold on creativity, ambiguities, imagination and possibilities.

It can perhaps be appreciated as a piece of inspirational source material for Bang-Bang-A-Boom and The Wormery, but only in a way that emphasises how much better both those stories did it. The Wormery certainly seemed inspired by its musical approach to Doctor Who, and achieved a wonderfully rhythmic story that seemed delicately composed like a melodic series of bars and notes which suits a story that organically blends musical crescendo with chaos. The Wormery also utilised the seedy space bar setting with a far more enchanting atmosphere of a cosmic waystation where time has stood still and an era has been preserved, ran by a duplicitous alpha female barmaid who’s flirtations with the Doctor are actually very charming and life-affirming with a tangible aroma between the two, and achieved a far better, more organic and spirited atmosphere, by virtue of not sounding like a box-ticking exercise written strictly for children and arrested adolescents. But The Ultimate Adventure sadly shares little of that sense of the otherworldly, witty, life-affirming or compelling. There’s just nothing really organic about it, nothing that reaches out.

The pacing is the problem. So many elements and set-pieces are thrown at the story which Terrance Dicks just doesn’t seem to be able to make flow naturally. His forte was always more quiet, atmospheric stories that took their time to unfold, not this kind of heavy action spectacle business. It’s mis-paced in some ways but it’s certainly not dull, and the sense of adventure is always there. The real problem with this story is that it was simply an add-on job for Big Finish. As we discussed in The Holy Terror, the limitations of audio often forces writers to work that bit harder against them, and put that extra bit of effort in to really reach the listener. That’s usually where Big Finish audios get their bite from. That bite isn’t here because the script was already written in 1989, so the job is treated as half done already, and all the writer is doing is adding unsubtle little adaptations to the audio medium that like a lot of Terrance Dicks’ novelisations, might as well have been written in a week.

The trick is to always remember that this is not your standard Big Finish story and not really part of the audio canon. If you believe it is for a moment then all the good work Big Finish has done beforehand is suddenly undone. The Daleks that had once burned entire galaxies are suddenly bumbling goons as disposable as anything else in this plastic universe. The Sixth Doctor, who has been given such rich character development over the course of the audios that he’s turned many critic’s heads, is suddenly reduced to this false, dumbed down frivolity spectacle like the puppet he was back in the JNT era. To treat this as a serious part of Big Finish is to disintegrate the entirety of Big Finish’s believable universe of worlds and dangers. It’s hard because it has the official Nick Briggs Dalek voices, and lazer effects, and has Colin Baker as the Doctor, giving it an authentic Big Finish feel. And makes a reference to Evelyn to boot. But that has to be nothing more than lip service, a treat for the fans who wanted to take a trip down memory lane. This is a relic of a period where theatre was suffering poor turnouts and so started banking on a certain cheapness, a la Emu’s Pink Windmill. That aside, it’s occasionally entertaining, sometimes amidst the false frivolity there’s a genuine bit of fun, and it moves at a decent enough pace. There’s even a chance it’s unchallenging simplicity, nostalgia, fan service and naive upbeatness and optimism, could make it your ideal comfort food if you’re feeling really down. But the main draw of this story is as a piece of Doctor Who history, and history always has its ugly and shameful parts. On that score it delivers.

Infact as a time capsule of the era it was made in, it feels like such an utterly faithful recreation that you’d forget it isn’t the real thing. For instance Bang-Bang-A-Boom may be an affectionate tribute to the style of a Season 24 story, but it’s just too darn good and witty to ever be able to pass for the real thing. But this story actually creates a real sense of what this play was like to watch back in 1989. It may be cynical and superficial, but if anything that makes it even more true to its era.

In the extras, Nick Briggs said it best when he said that recreating The Ultimate Adventure was almost like rediscovering a missing adventure. So regardless of how good or bad it is, it’s still going to be a must-buy for many of us fans. Hell, many of us would gladly trade in all TV Doctor Who after 1989 (or even after 1980) in exchange for ten minutes of rediscovered footage from the Space Pirates. What’s £14 going to amount to, really?

Doctor Who has been produced in almost every type of media, but one of the most unheralded is the stage play: back in 1989, Terrance Dicks wrote a script entitled “The Ultimate Adventure” to be produced for the stage starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor with the Daleks and the Cybermen. Pertwee would play the Doctor for half the show’s run, to be replaced by Colin Baker for the second half. “The Ultimate Adventure” was actually the third significant Doctor Who stage play, following after “The Curse of the Daleks” and “The Seven Keys to Doomsday.” As no professional recordings of these performances were made, fans’ impressions of the shows were doomed to be based on hazy recollections and promotional photography — until 2008, when Big Finish produced all three Doctor Who stage plays for audio, starting with “The Ultimate Adventure.” As a way to bring these plays to a modern audience, this was a brilliant move; unfortunately, the first of these productions is horrible.

I have no doubt that “The Ultimate Adventure” would have been hugely entertaining in a theater setting. You’ve got one of two larger-than-life Doctors — in this case, Colin Baker — along with the series’s two biggest villains, and a series of lines designed to evoke laughter from a supportive audience. Heard in private, as an audio production, however, the story isn’t effective at all. The Daleks’ plan is utterly incomprehensible, revisiting their scheme from “Day of the Daleks” to sabotage a peace conference, but immediately begging the question of why they don’t use their unimaginable power to blow the conference up on their own. The Cybermen contribute absolutely nothing: they’re faceless henchmen who do the Daleks’ dirty work, and show none of the charisma that made them so memorable in the ‘80s TV stories. There’s also a third faction — human “mercenaries” — that’s so ill-thought-out it’s embarrassing. Apparently, every mercenary in the entire galaxy knows all the others, and they all operate by a formal code of honor when they’re not hanging out at the one mercenary bar in space. To describe this as a “plot” would be insulting to plots.

Colin Baker clearly enjoys recreating this role, and you can tell from his performance how he would play to the crowd while on stage. Unfortunately, he’s saddled with two horrible companions in Jason (Noel Sullivan) and Crystal (Claire Huckle) who serve no function other than to sing songs (oh yes) and fall in love with each other. There’s some kind of small creature called Zog, there’s David Banks as a mercenary leader (and I know it’s not Big Finish’s fault, but it sounds weird to hear Banks’s unmodified voice alongside Cybermen), and there’s even a scene with Margaret Thatcher (Nadine Cox), of all people.

Look, it’s an exercise in silly indulgence, and it’s clearly intended to entertain a live, raucous crowd. It’s impossible to give it a serious review, since there’s absolutely no attempt at anything of substance — and that’s not even a bad thing. Unfortunately, outside of historical record, producing “The Ultimate Adventure” for audio doesn’t seem to work: it’s quite clearly fraying at the edges and Colin Baker can’t even hold it together. Check it out if you’re curious about what they put on stage back in ‘89 — but unless you have your own TARDIS to check out a live performance, don’t expect a lot of entertainment.